"Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records. It's more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them - rather than to catalogue more stuff - you can do that forever"----Harry Smith ^^^^^^^^^^ "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old Time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today/Tomorrow will be dying"---Robert Herrick

Monday, March 18, 2013

"What exactly does it mean to plunder and pastiche a
style you actually invented?"

He's talking about his decision to revisit a style he came up with right at the start of his musical career, influenced by Peel bands / dub / messthetics/ Eno:

"developed at the age of 17... a scratchy, organic one based on using the
microphone of my cassette tape recorder as a new bridge for a guitar
with radically loosened strings. I’d stuff tissue paper under the low
strings to make a dry bass sound, and play the top strings in a style
that sounded like an electric guitar above-bridge, or a kalimba... The recordings were bounced down on two-track tape machines borrowed from the language lab at my dad’s English school...

"It’s easy enough to make recordings the same way now — I have the
acoustic guitar and the tissue paper, anyway — but is my metabolism as
quick and nervous as it was in 1977? Can I stick to the Dogme-like
discipline of forbidding myself reverb, synths, electronic rhythm
quantisation?"

And yeah, what does it mean to return to a stage of one's own music that was intended and felt at the time as authentic / uniquely original / sui generis?

Quite a few musicians do this, of course (Bowie, currently, to an extent; Talking Heads and Radiohead once they'd stretched experimentally as far as could go, "got it out of their system"....). But there is inevitably an element of artifice that overlays such returns to one's "natural" style. Perhaps also it is related to a kind of artistic ecology, that there was more potential to be extracted from a stage or phase left behind too quickly.

I certainly wouldn't mind it if Green suddenly decided to make a whole album of this sort of thing.